He said, "Almost half of what we do is not that valuable to our customers, but it's valuable to him, and her, and him", pointing through the conference-room window at my fellow programmers, "and that's why we do it. If we only did things that were very valuable to our customers, we wouldn't have nearly as many good engineers on the team as we do."
Customers want features as fast and as cheap as possible. I derive joy from solid test suites that avoid me getting paged while on call and team processes that don't allow config changes on Friday so pages don't happen on the weekend.
Very few craftspeople derive their joy from the customer experience. An electrician isn't happy because their work allows me to watch TV. A carpenter isn't happy because a new set of stairs lets me get to the basement faster. They're happy because of their perception of the quality of their work. This goes away when the visible or fun parts are no longer "their work"
If all they see is code, they will get satisfaction from tidy code, not user happiness. One good thing about AI is it elevates product engineers because they more directly bridge the customer-product-code divide.
I've been at a place that is basically microservices slop (several dozen services per engineer). They're all poorly maintained and at least a solid 40% of all this code that they've written could have been just a traefik or nginx configuration/container.
When you have a lot of inexperienced (relative to industry) and overworked software engineers, the solution to every problem becomes to write code and writing new code should be a last resort.
Worse still, there's just a poor general understanding of the internet protocols they're working with and of how to do distributed systems right. Unfortunately with LLMs I've been seeing this get worse, not better.
They use the LLMs for code generation but not architecture review. Bad ideas are getting fully-baked quickly before anyone with good sense can intervene.
Quite a few don't, no.
Different people derive enjoyment in different things and some of the best engineers do not find satisfaction in "delivering better customer experience" but in working with, and improving, cool technology. Its up to management to find areas of the business where they can deploy these people in a way that dove-tails with business success.
Its also the case that only working on projects that "deliver customer value", and having to justify every single endeavor through that lense, is how you end up in a local maxima in your tech stack, get mired in technical debt, and then get lapped by your competitors who have the foresight to work on foundational technology that enables future velocity.
To be frank, its endlessly frustrating that your median Hacker News poster doesn't get this, and instead prefer to brow-beat people about how they're caring about the wrong things.
It's not about new technology for the sake of new technology, it's about taking pride in one's work and what that person created.
Honestly, the American obsession with "everyone should think of what the customer wants" is exhausting verging on toxic. The people who talk about that point loudest are inevitably owners saying "you should all care more to make me richer". If you want your employees to care about the customer more than their own personal satisfaction, give them significant equity and significant autonomy such that they can see how their actions have direct impact. Saying they should think of the customer and then treating the employees as an interchangeable cost to be minimized is insulting and won't lead to anyone focusing on the customer.
> It's not about new technology for the sake of new technology, it's about taking pride in one's work what what that person created.
Thank god, I really want to say that I appreciate that you got what I said. A simple upvote didn't feel like enough.
Employees are humans, not robots. Its inconvenient, but if you want a world-class team then you're going to have to deal with the fact that people derive satisfaction from different things, and you're not going to be able to motivate them by beating them into submission about what they "should care about." This may involve having to think creatively about how to manage your people instead of treating them as fungible work units.
> Platform and internal dev teams have customers as well. I'm not terribly frustrated that you don't get this.
Respectfully, this response here is a perfect example of you not getting it and assuming that I am the one that doesn't get it. You have not said anything that I have not already heard and understood before. The fact that people have different values does not mean they "don't get it." But saying something like "Do the engineers not derive enjoyment in their jobs from making the customer experience better?" does imply that you don't understand other peoples' values.
The fact that you posted "Platform and internal dev teams have customers as well." indicates to me that you missed the point. Whether they are on those teams and whether they consider other engineers their customer is besides the point; they may not derive satisfaction from "delivering value" to those people regardless. That doesn't mean they don't care about their customers, which is the take away the median HN poster takes, but rather that they are not energized and motivated at the end of the day by delivering value to them.
> I've certainly worked with devs (and managers) who wanted to push new technology for the sake of using new technology,
Sure, everyone has. But the flip-side of this is a class of people who assume any tech improvement that doesn't directly move a metric is just an effort at resume-building. Just as often I've seen efforts and building a more robust system as unneeded resume building despite clear need (usually because the need is very hard to measure).
> and they should have found a side project as an outlet for this.
I mean, this is incredibly dismissive and exactly the attitude I was talking about. No-one is saying that engineers should be allowed to just do whatever to have fun. Work is work. But ideally you find ways to organize your team so that everyone is motivated and energized by their work, and doing so requires that you understand that not everyone is motivated by the same thing. But in these discussions, the attitude comes across as "everyone should be motivated by delivering good customer experience and if they aren't we shouldn't care."
If there's no opportunity to give these sorts of people fulfilling work, then fair enough. It *is* work. But the attitude displayed here is that we shouldn't even try and understand their values and think about ways to productively deploy that.
As an aside about customers, internal and external customers are, in my experience, treated vastly differently. We care about experience for external customers, but internal customers is usually all about velocity and trade offs. The bar is substantially lower, and rough edges are almost always ignored. So I am skeptical at the idea that we can just frame internal users as customers and all the discrepancies go away.
It also misses the fact that other people on my team are also my customers, because they have to maintain the system! And I am also my own customer, because I also have to maintain it!
This quote makes it seem like the work is self-indulgent, and I have seen that happen sometimes, but it's not half of what we do.
In many ways, I think what's working for me with AI is that it is very similar to pair programming, but without the social-emotional investment required to interact with another person for long periods of time.
You come to a point where you realize that you're not doing anything that creative, or nothing you haven't done hundreds of times before, maybe every few years you switch to whatever new tech stack has gotten popular, but it's fundamentally all the same. And you start to realize that everything you do has a lifespan of a few years, and then you (or probably someone else) will re-do it.
As retirement starts feeling like it is something that will happen sooner than later, you look back and see that almost nothing you've built is still in use, or will be for very long after you're gone.
I hope to retire in about two years. At that point, I plan to not be using any technology or computers in my life for a while, or as little as possible. Maybe at some point I'll rediscover some of the fun I used to have writing programs for myself, but I suspect I'll need a long break before that happens.
So true!
But it's interesting that, from the perspective of someone in the middle, neither near the beginning or end of my career, I am (now, after a period of sadness) experiencing AI as a reinvigoration of fun in the work. But it's a very different kind of fun. I had totally lost the fun of clean code and figuring out new technologies and approaches and abstractions, just like you describe.
But now I'm experiencing the joy of thinking about what I can build, now that it's so much faster and easier to try ideas. I think this is actually getting back to an earlier version of my joy with computers. I can (vaguely) remember in my early years being like "wow! cool! I can make stuff that shows up on a computer screen!". But then it turned out to be ... pretty damn hard to actually do that, which led me to more excitement about all the ideas and technologies and techniques for managing the complexity of software engineering. But then that started feeling more tedious and samey, but I still had to put lots of time into it, there wasn't any other option.
But now all that is so much easier, and I'm rediscovering the fun of "wow cool, I can make things!", but now also with the whole benefit of the time I have spent doing the work of software engineering.
Software development has more in common with agriculture than architecture. The code always needs maintenance.
Legal marketing specifically. Weirdly, my work had more impact, respect and longevity there than the place where I'm a much more senior engineer supposedly directing the work of a whole organization of engineers. I had it better where I was a 1 of 2 than a leader among hundreds.
But honestly I've stopped being excited to type out code in my personal projects anymore either. I've become much more excited by what I can accomplish on my own in a small number of hours squeezed between work and family. I still experience this as a loss, but I'm no longer so sad about it, and moreso feel invigorated by the possibilities and opportunities that have been opened up.
A way that I have come to think about this is: I used to always be curious about the product management role. How exciting to come up with ideas and validate them with users. But I always demurred because it would be so frustrating to have to rely on other people to bring those ideas to fruition! On balance, I always preferred being the one executing ideas to being the one generating and validating them. But now I can properly do both things! (In my hobby time, that is, at work we still have this idea/execution split, at least for the time being.)
> Jeb: "If everybody's got one of these auto-whatsits, does anybody code anymore?"
> Doc Brown: "Of course we code. But for recreation. For fun."
> Jeb: "Code for fun? What the hell kind of fun is that?"
Then they announced that they removed the limit/making further request just cost extra for them. That's when I started using it as I did for my personal projects I pay subscriptions for...
Then Copilot increased their pricing. Announced in April I think? But took effect this month. This Monday they announced that the limits are back in effect. So I guess I'll be going back to hand coding next week, as my tokens are about to run out ಥ ‿ ಥ
Corporate is always so silly. I mean I know how it happens: everyone just wants to get their bonus, so different management roles try to coerce the employees to do whatever best serves their bottomline - rarely related to whatever is good for the corporation... But it's always silly to live through it.
But SHOULD we? With great power comes great responsibility - and I'm getting the impression we're (quickly) building a world that isn't very fun to live in. We technically have a choice here - DO we want bots writing our prose and responding to our customer service inquiries?
OTOH, I think we absolutely SHOULD automate necessary "drudgery" type work wherever we can, but we're going to need a radical reconceptualization of how we distribute the spoils of economic productivity as a result. Unfortunately, I think the type of reconceptualization we'd need would entail a complete overhaul of many long-established and deeply-internalized concepts (rights and duties of ownership of intellectual and private property, decoupling of identity and occupation, etc.), and from everything I've seen, that will be a long and painful process assuming it's even achievable. (Especially in the US, where decades of pro-business messaging has yielded a culture that equates income-earning ability/entrepreneurial success with individual human worth. I really struggle to imagine a path toward unwinding that, but there's little chance it'll be a smooth ride.)
It sucks for the employees, otoh it might be the only way we're going to beat Baumol's Cost Disease.
In the past few decades productivity has exploded, but service employees have largely failed to increase productivity in any way because it's harder to automate these tasks.
It's the reason the costs of things like education and healthcare are downright extortionate, the reason you're paying back your college well into your fifties, the reason you don't call an ambulance for someone in the US because you don't want to ruin their life financially.
We may have to trade the personal fulfillment in these jobs for the broader affordable access to these services.
You might wanna think again on that line of reasoning, because plenty of other countries have the same dynamics with respect to service employees, but they don't suffer the very US-only problem of ridiculous education and healthcare costs where calling an ambulance can ruin someones life.
That may change, and it may benefit everyone except the people who get fulfillment in their life from the one-on-one human interaction they get from people who need services.
Administrators, on the other hand, are a massive part of the costs in the health sector (IIRC the Obama administration chickened out on truly reforming healthcare exactly because the number of administrators that would be made redundant would tank the economy). A significant amount of administrative work can be automated.
Weird. I thought it was the fact that you have a cohort of people who are grossly overpaid to represent people who do none of the work yet expect an ever-increasing amount of value created by the work to be shifted to them every 90 days, no matter what, forever.
> We may have to trade the personal fulfillment in these jobs for the broader affordable access to these services.
Then you'll run into two problems:
1) no one will want to do necessary jobs without increased compensation, which is at the root of your analysis of "Baumol's Cost Disease"
2) at least in the US, you'll have a bunch of increasingly miserable people living in a society that gives them less and less to lose while increasing the availability of things that allow them to take out their frustrations upon themselves (substances) or others (weapons)
I am having some success in working to acquire a taste for different parts of the work. But I suspect that this won't be an option for most people.
but did we increase our EBITDA for the quarter?
Where did the 20% number come from? I’d argue it’s way more than that (or variable, i.e. dependent on who’s using it/how it’s being used/what it’s being used on).
Having said that, the number, to me, doesn’t even matter. You could replace that with 200%, and it’d be just as true.
Programming was one of the ones which was, because there were fewer programmers than openings. Now that's flipping, thus naturally, the enjoyment is going to be sucked out of it.
I think it's called 'capitalism'
Except the intern is trapped inside an iron lung and must communicate entirely by text. And also has zero real creativity or self-motivation.
Now they get to fill out excel sheets, babysit people and sit in planning meetings.
I think it is more important than ever to manage your wealth in a way that sustains you from capital alone in a world where employment gets progressively more toxic.
The way to achieve it is buying maintenance efficient and cheap car, make renovations smart, make good choices all around to minimise expenses. Operate your life like a corporation. First, cut the expenditures.
For me the ability to do whatever I am interested in at the moment, is worth almost any sacrifice.
Then I can seek one time contracts or short time jobs that fulfil my mental needs.
My monthly expenses are no more than 5000 dollars and mostly consistently less than that.
Which is okay because the money spending doesn’t bring me any joy nowadays. The money isn’t what gives me happiness. Only other people can provide that and activities that are dirt cheap usually, like reading or broadly understood hacking
Consumption is a short lived and deceptive joy that causes more guilt than whatever dopamine it is worth really. Governments hate people like me which means I must be doing something right.
Both are areas where costs are going up at a rate which is much higher than official inflation rates, and comp increases often don't even match inflation!
So the need for working till you're forced to give up still remains.
As per children, contraception exists and you should use it as kid is a dubious and too risky investment. You could for instance raise a little sociopath or two.
Healthcare for parents is for me at least letting them into a boat in the ocean when they get first alzheimer's symptoms like in Hemingway Old man and the sea. Native Americans used to do it. They just released their old guys to the forest or steppes. Which reinforces my point about the kids being rather bad investment. Do not count on that.
It's objectively more wise to save 500k-1mil from raising a kid to invest that money and spend it when old, hiring a professional caretaker. Have friends, spouse, not kids.
In any case it probably only matters that USA healthcare costs are so exorbitant. This is the crux to why it could never work for americans unless you are at much higher financial level than any sort of frugal upper middle class specialist in 40s.
It's the only western country where retiring earlier is so expensive. I thought maybe it would make up in the extra money you can make and save in taxes without VAT but no, after research I think that healthcare is so much pricier that it is incomparable.
So it is not simplistic but it's different environment altogether, one in which it actually works and I am really grateful for that.
Whatever productivity gains models are giving us is being eaten away by other factors.
Unfortunately though, what does that matter? Your employer does not care how do you feel. You are paid to bring them benefits, they aren't running a charity. If you do feel down, that is your issue and you shouldn't let that influence how you work.
Just to be clear, I don't like that either. But it is what it is.
It's not defiance, it's reality: if you drag down my motivation, that's going to drag down my productivity. I don't really have much active control over that.
The real problem is the amount of value that gets left on the table.
Also, mental health is just as much a part of health and well-being as the physical.
That's probably too much a troll so while I get that you are grinding your anti-capitalism axe, you're also seeding hopelessness and trapped falsely fatalistic thinking. It has gone this way but it doesn't have to and the whole arrangement is a local optimum with much higher global optima available.
In fact there are many of us who have created a parallel life and extend ladders all the time (within our capacity) for others to join us.
Is everyone entitled to a high quality of life?
If not, then who draws the line as to who deserves what benefit in life? You?
Yes.
Only finite land available in high QoL areas such as Orange County California, New York City, or Hawaii, depending on your lifestyle.
You want to tell us who is allowed to live there?
Because sure as hell won’t fit all 345 million people in America with a desire for higher QoL
Consumers will be spoiled for choice between deeply mediocre options.
Besides, what's the point of adopting new technologies if it's not to increase the quality of life? If everyone just exists in service of the product development lifecycle, who and what are the products actually for?
Anyone holding passive index ETFs in their brokerage / 401k / pension accounts.